PPC management basics for small businesses

What is PPC?
PPC stands for pay per click, and PPC ads are adverts listed on search engines as “sponsored ads”, I’m sure you’ll have seen them from time to time. The way that these adverts work is quite complex, but we’ll cover the basics quickly for those who aren’t yet familiar.

There are a certain number of unique benefits to PPC ads, firstly, the advert is being sponsored by an entity such as Google, basically meaning that Google has verified this site to be relevant based on whatever the viewer happens to have searched. This in itself is beneficial for any number of reasons, but another major perk of PPC ads are that they fast-track your content right to the very top of all search results.

To organically grow your website to appear on the very first page of Google consistently is no easy feat, but to find yourself directly at the top of the page without the viewer having to scroll is a little bit like opening a shop on the busiest street in a capital city, very busy. In order to find your page listed at the top of the search results without paying for a sponsored link would be to fine-tune your website until the search engine judged it to be one of the finest resources online for the topic of the page.

For the reasons listed above, it’s easy to see the benefits that PPC ads offer. What, however, is the role of PPC management?

PPC management

PPC management is effectively all of the technical work behind organising your ads, setting budgets, and finally improving the ROI your adverts bring by attempting to reduce costs, targeting more traffic, or by targeting visitors who are statistically more likely to be at the point of purchase. The point of purchase basically means find those visitors who are making searches that correspond to sales, as opposed to searches that are looking for information or comparing the market.  

By using trial and error, your PPC manager will also be able to reduce the overall cost of each click you that an ad brings into your site by trying less popular and thus less expensive keywords from your topic.